Journal of Diabetic Complications & Medicine

Machine Learning Methods for Automated Detection of Severe Diabetic Neuropathy

Abstract

Herbert F Jelinek, David J Cornforth and Andrei V Kelarev

Objective: The present study aimed at investigating machine learning methods for automated detection of severe diabetic neuropathy. Severe diabetic neuropathy represents a significant neurological problem in diabetes as it requires urgent intervention to reduce the risk of sudden cardiac death. Automated detection provides a tool that can be applied to clinical data and for identifying comorbidities that can trigger diagnosis and treatment.

Methods: We applied multi scale Allen factor to determine heart rate variability, a marker for diabetic neuropathy from ECG recordings as features to be used for the machine learning methods and automated detection. The major innovation of this work is the introduction of a new Graph-Based Machine Learning System (GBMLS). This method is intended to enhance the effectiveness of the diagnosis of severe diabetic neuropathy. We applied it to the multi scale Allen factor (MAF) features as a collection of attributes determined from the recorded ECG bio signals. These attributes can be collected as a result of routine ECG investigation of patients regardless of the presenting medical problems.

Results: Our experiments compared the sensitivity and specificity of the automated detection produced by GBMLS with analogous outcomes achieved by various other machine learning approaches. To this end we used a comprehensive collection of important classifiers and clusterers available in the open source machine learning software package Scikit-learn. The experiments have demonstrated that the best outcomes were obtained by GBMLS in combination with MAF, which improved sensitivity to 0.89 and specificity to 0.98 and outperformed several other classifiers and clusterers including Random Forest with sensitivity of 0.83 and specificity of 0.92.

Conclusion: The novel GBMLS machine learning technique applied to MAF attributes has outperformed other machine learning methods and achieved excellent sensitivity and specificity. These results are significant and sufficiently effective to be recommended for practical application of this technique.